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Jan 23 2013
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12 Month Total Online Presence Action Plan

Last week I wrote a post that addressed the overwhelming amount of things you need to focus on in order to build a Total Online Presence. I broke it down into 12 months of action themes to make it easier.

I received so much feedback on this approach that I decided to conduct a live online seminar and reveal a set checklist of steps for each month.

The Total Online Blueprint Seminar was a hit!

We had over 1500 people sign up for the session and during the live program the hashtag for the event #dtmTOP trended globally.

The overwhelming consensus of those that participated is that there’s a great deal to do when it comes to building a Total Online Presence and the highly practical nature of the action steps I shared was just what people wanted.

Consider a few comments from participants:

 

 

Replay the online seminar in its entirety below.

You may also view and download the slides I used here.

During the session I also introduced a new small group coaching program where I will take up to 10 coaches and consultants through an 8-week intense program aimed at helping them build a Total Online Presence. The program also includes a complete online portal of training and resources for each participant.

If you know you need to invest time and resources into enhancing your effectiveness with online marketing or you would like to obtain more knowledge and resources to share with your clients, this could be the perfect answer.

Check out the entire Total Online Presence coaching program here: (Don’t wait, we start Feb 5th!)

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media, Total Online Presence Tagged With:
Jan 21 2013
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How to Guarantee ROI With Social Media Participation

Now that more and more organizations are investing time and money into social media participation, people are looking for ways to measure the return in terms of direct business rather than fans, friends and followers.

But, this seems to be in direct opposition to the common advice offered about social media participation. I mean, everyone knows you can’t sell on Twitter and Facebook.

The fact of the matter is that you can’t really sell anything, anywhere, until you build trust.

If you want to guarantee ROI with your social media participation you must first build trust and then turn trust into sales.

Investing in social media in this manner has a higher cost, but it also brings a measurable, consistent and predictable return when practiced fully.

The social media lead system

Today, smart marketers are using free content as a way to attract fans and followers. Many other are creating and hiding content in an effort to get Facebook and Twitter users to Like their page or submit their email to get to the good stuff.

Facebook Offers

Promoting free content using a Facebook Offer

If you want to generate a far greater return and see the full power in this idea, you must combine these approaches.

The first step in this systematic approach is to create and share valuable content with no gate or requirements. Then you may offer readers that consume this content even more content when they Like your page or visit a landing page to sign up for more updates.

The power behind this 2-step approach is that it not only tempts more people to acquire and interact with your first wave of content, the people that then take your call to action are much more highly qualified as you’ve already built a layer of trust with them before you asked for anything in exchange.

This approaches works in most any social network and is particularly effective using a when enhanced using paid promotion such as Facebook Offers and Sponsored Updates.

Here’s an example campaign

  • Create an eBook with a compelling title and allow people to download it with just a click – no email address, no like, no share.
  • Place a call to action in the eBook that points to a series of video that demonstrate several of the most enticing points from the eBook.
  • Direct eBook readers to “unlock” access to the videos by Liking your gated Facebook page using a tool such as ShortStack, sharing a page in social media using Viral Lock or simply visiting a landing page to exchange their email to gain access.
  • Amplify access to the original eBook in all social channels
  • To increase participation, invest in advertising to promote your original eBook with things such as Facebook Offers and Google AdWords

This trust building system borrows from proven business building tactics and brings them directly to the growing world of social media marketing.

The 2-step approach allows you to more easily build trust and capture highly targeted leads from your social media participation. With these elements in play you can guarantee a return on your social media investment.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,
Dec 28 2012
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Big Changes to 5 Important Online Tools

Some of my favorite tools and services have gone through some pretty big changes recently – enough so that felt it warranted a post just to point the changes out.

The first three, Gmail, Evernote and TweetDeck, are tools I use every day to run my business. The last two, Yelp and Foursquare, are familiar rating and location tools that have morphed a bit to go after the lucrative local search market and deserve a good hard look from local small businesses.

1) User interface changes for Gmail – This is a pretty big change as far as I’m concerned and addresses a number of needed enhancements for handling mail. You can switch back and forth from the new view to the old by clicking on the new view link in the compose window.

  • Composing Messages: One thing you may notice about the new interface is the way you compose a new message. It looks similar to a Gmail chat window but a little bigger. This makes things simpler by allowing you to check old emails and saved drafts because you don’t have to leave the current page you are on to write a new email.
  • Profile Pictures: It is now much easier to keep up with who is saying what within your email threads. Your contact profile pictures now show up within a conversation.
  • Themes: New HD themes are now provided by iStockphoto. Simply choose the theme that suits you in preferences.
  • Labels and Chat: These are constantly shown in the navigation panel on the left side. You can now customize that by size as well as completely hide your chat area.
  • Search Box: Gmail’s new interface has incorporated a better search function allowing a drop-down advanced search box, which makes things much easier to locate.
  • More here

2) Evernote 5 brings new look – probably the biggest news here is the totally overhauled and more visually appealing look of Evernote.

  • Sidebar: The new Evernote 5 has implemented a left hand sidebar. With this sidebar comes a section for shortcuts that enable you to use a customized variety of notes, previous searches, tags and notebooks. Along with this you have the ability to view your tags, notebooks and latest notes.
  • Notebooks: With the new changes you can now integrate your notebooks with shared notebooks that other people have allowed you to access.
  • Note Editor: You will be able to see how many people have access to the same note you are viewing. You will see that at the very top of the note. There is also a function to shared notes updates, as they are integrated with Mountain Lion’s Notification Center. This is helpful so it won’t overwhelm you as they come in.
  • Atlas Function: Simple way to view and access your notes is using this function. It allows people to search for entries geographically.
  • Card View: This will show you text notes and images in a thumbnail preview.
  • Type-Ahead: This is a search field that finishes your inquiry with ideas from previous entries, to include saved searches, keywords, and related notebooks. You are also able to improve your searches in more detail with advanced options.
  • More here

TweetDeck

3) Tweetdeck get a long overdo facelift – Now that Twitter owns TweetDeck it has finally ushered in some enhancements.

  • Twitter Cards: You can now embed a photo or other media into a tweet with the 2.1.0 version. This makes your twitter stream appealing and attractive.
  • Font: From your settings pane, you can now change your font size. There are only three options: 13 pt.-Small, 14 pt.-Medium or 15 pt.-Large.
  • Color Scheme: You now have a choice to change your colors to the white background which has dark gray text. The links, URLs, hash tags and twitter addresses are blue, making them much easier to see.
  • Columns: You are able to add a new column and check your twitter lists from the Tweetdeck toolbar. You can decide what you would like to incorporate into your columns, like a specific tweet stream from a particular group or person, or from one of your lists, or from a search. When adding a new column Tweetdeck will come up with suggestions for that particular subject, interactions, mentions and timeline.
  • Shortcuts: The toolbar has many shortcuts to make things easier and simpler. For example, it has buttons that control the columns that will enable you to move through it seamlessly. You can also conduct a Twitter search and start a new tweet. When creating a new tweet you can add pictures and schedule that tweet for when you would like for it to go out or you can email that specific tweet. If you press ‘N’ on your keyboard you can instantly create a tweet. To send it, simply press “command” and “return” at the same time.
  • More here

4) Foursquare Business Pages

The new business pages feature allows business owners to provide status updates, post deals, special promotions, photos, message and tips to the activity feeds of loyal or repeat customers who may be in the same vicinity. It automatically updates for those customers who are where the business is located.

Additionally, when a customer searches for places in the Foursquare app or through the web, these important updates will show up in search results.

The merchant dashboard has been redesigned to where merchants can manage updates more efficiently. This also allows SEO services, social media marketers and business owners to see data on businesses with numerous locations with improved analytics.

More here

yelp

5) Yelp keeps enhancing its Local Directory

In 2012 Yelp and Bing partnered to bring Yelp’s local business content to the local search pages of Bing. With this partnership, Yelp is able to bring its photos, business qualities and reviews to Bing’s search engine with hopes of strengthening Microsoft’s attempts to be competitive with Google+ Local.

Yelp listings are used in Apple’s Siri iPhone assistant, Yext listings and in the navigation systems in BMW, Mercedes and Lexus.

Local small businesses have plenty of reasons to get more active with Yelp and other location based tools. Facebook recently revamped it’s “nearby” feature that allows people to discover businesses based on location.

More here

One thing is certain – we live in a rapidly changing world of business and technology that calls for staying on top of a never-ending stream of new and emerging tools. But, hey, that’s what I’m here for!

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,
Dec 21 2012
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Are You Taking Advantage of Your Awesomeness

As we come to the end of another year I wanted to send a very simple message of thanks.

There’s no Holiday Sale, free shipping or act now call to action in today’s post.

Today I just want to share the short video above that I hope you find contains some inspiration.

I firmly believe that small businesses and entrepreneurs hold some very natural advantages and my message in this video is to urge you to take advantage of your awesomeness.

Please feel free to share this message with friends and colleagues and let’s make 2013 a great year!

I would love for you to share your thoughts on the subject as you watch the video!

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With:
Dec 17 2012
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The Far Reaching Implications of The Social Business Model

For some time now I’ve been suggesting that social media as we’ve come to address it over the last few years doesn’t really matter anymore because it just is. We’ve given up on seeing it as some separate practice and accepted that it’s simply a function of marketing that must be integrated.

social business model

photo credit: dgray_xplane via photopin cc

Lately I’ve begun to wonder if social behavior, not social media, is actually much more than we’ve made of it.

We’ve bolted certain socially enabled practices on to our businesses to provide greater reach, customer service and the pretense of connection, but I wonder if we’ve stopped dreadfully short of the true potential of social.

Even those that preach social strategy are generally talking about finding ways to use social tactics to support existing business strategies and models.

My belief is that the real opportunity is to build a fully social business model, one that addresses the total picture of social behavior. One that moves beyond social tactics to a place where social is the business, is a part of every consideration.

First off let me suggest that we’ve always had social behavior, in some cases we’ve had it in our businesses. People have always been attracted to people and causes they believed in and connected with. We’ve always joined forces and collaborated in ways to effect change and grow. We’ve always belonged to communities that supported and nurtured our basic needs and our needs to be social animals.

The significant evolution over the last decade is that technology has allowed us to behave in this manner without the constraint of geography. We are now free to find, join and coalesce around shared ideas no matter where we are. That dynamic has impacted the world of business in ways that I don’t know that we’ve all come to fully appreciate.

Connection is now possible with anyone. Collaboration is now possible everywhere. Community is now possible with everyone. The true social business model involves anyone, everyone, everywhere.

So, if we were to fully embrace this idea we would begin to think of social as something far beyond marketing. Were we to treat this idea as a business model, then we would have to apply core social tenets to every element of the business.

Social Purpose – To start with we would lead with the single-minded reason or why we do what we do as our core point of differentiation. (I wrote about this extensively in my last book The Commitment Engine.) It would be our story and cause and it would the thing that attracted people who wanted to join the cause. Non-profit organizations have leaned heavily on this practice because they had a compelling cause and often lacked other means to attract. Leading with purpose has now become one of the most attractive attributes of the for profit business and social behavior has dramatically increased people’s desire for connection with ideas and stories they can believe in.

Social Products – Gone are the days when we developed products and services based on market research and gut feeling. The social business model suggests that we create products and services with our community rather than for it. Collaboration is a central element of the social business model and one that benefits smaller organizations greatly. What if you put your ideas out freely and openly and asked your customers or a Google+ Community to help you develop them.

Social Hiring – One of the greatest benefits of throwing of the constraints of geography is that we now have access to a world talent pool. We no longer need to even think in terms of hiring people as we are free to acquire work completed by people with very specific skill sets in ways that we can apply as needed. Of course consistently leading with purpose is an amazing way to attract for fit when hiring someone internally.

Social Sourcing – Everything we need to run and grow a business is out there in our community. The social business model suggests that we source expertise, advice, resources, partnerships and supplies by simply asking, referring and listening.

Social Research – For some time now smart marketers have been using a new set of tools to listen to their markets. All too often this simply meant listening for mentions and responding. The real potential here is the ability to listen to for unmet needs and substantial market opportunities. Organizations that become very skilled in this behavior will gain significant competitive advantages. Listening in the social business model is part sociology, part innovation and part anthropology.

Social Finance – You need look no farther than the current rash of crowdfunding services to understand the impact of social behavior in the finance arena. Private funding and the coming changes in equity investment have made social finance an important element of the social business model. This area is poised to move beyond the novelty stage and into a significant mainstream funding model.

Social Marketing – I’ve saved the obvious for last because until we move social outside of marketing we limit the idea of the social business model greatly. Marketers get the need for connection, collaboration and community as inherent traits of good marketing, but stop at fully engaging social behavior. Every element of marketing, research, development, creative, content, can be crowdsourced and co-created. Every person in the organization must educate, serve and sell. In the social business model marketing in no longer a department so much as way to express social behavior, purpose and community.

I plan to explore the various elements of this idea in future posts and welcome your thoughts and opinions on the implications of the social business model.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With:
Dec 10 2012
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How to Make Your Content Mobile Friendly

When I think about the work I do these days very little of it actually needs to be done on a “real” computer.

Writing a post like this, creating a PowerPoint deck or maybe editing a video are things that are still best done by me using lots of computing power and a large screen or two.

Just about everything else – managing email, reading blog posts, participating in social media and consuming content in various forms – can be done, sometimes much more conveniently, using a mobile or tablet device.

As these devices become more prevalent and powerful people will adopt them for all but a handful of business and personal tasks.

Content consumption is already headed towards the 50% mark in terms of mobile vs. laptop as the reader of choice. On my site mobile devices account for right at 15% of all traffic today. That’s up over 150% over last year at this time and represents a 16% increase from just last month.

The point is you must package your content in ways that the growing legions of tablet and mobile consumers can enjoy or run the risk of turning this important readership away.

iphone content

Responsive design on iPhone

ipad content

Responsive design redispays theme for the iPad

There are a number of methods to consider in the mobile content display category.

Mobile Plugins

If you are a WordPress user you can add a plugin like WPTouch that makes your content much more consumable on mobile devices, but comes at the cost of very little in terms of design flexibility. In other words, it’s not the best looking option.

Mobile Only Content

You can also find mobile designers here or use a tool like Duda Mobile to recreate your site as a mobile version. This offers design flexibility and even allows you to highlight the most useful content that someone on the go might desire. The downside is this becomes another asset you have to update and maintain.

Mobile App

At one point the holy grail of mobile content was the custom app. Think about it, someone is going to download your app and then have total access to every bit of your content in a variety of interactive and engaging formats. What’s not to love about that? The problem is nobody (or at least not many) wants your app, no matter how much they might like your content. You can however, build your own cross-platform app pretty easily these days with services like Tiggzi.

Responsive Design

The option that is growing in popularity and that embraces the idea that all content should be viewed from one site design is something called responsive design.

Responsive design is design that responds to the viewing environment and adapts layout, orientation and size based on the screen. Design elements, images and text adapt via CSS rather than plugins or add-ons.

This site employs responsive design via a custom child theme on the Genesis framework and I believe the mobile experience and subsequent rise in mobile views, time on site via mobile and decreased mobile bounce rate attest to the value of the enhanced user experience. In my view, this is the approach that most websites should employ today.

Mobile Video

As a bit of a side note I want to add a thought or two about mobile video. With the expansion of 4G LTE video consumption on mobile devices has skyrocketed. A subset of responsive design is responsive video design. Use tools like FitVid or custom CSS to make sure your videos resize to tablet and mobile screens.

Use this mobile emulator from dotMobi to see how your content looks today on a variety of mobile devices and start moving towards making your content mobile friendly now.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,
Nov 28 2012
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3 Tips for Starting a Small Business Blog

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Collis Ta’eed – Enjoy!

Image credit: Shane Pope

In the age of social media, blogging is even more important as a small business marketing weapon and if anything, it has been enhanced by social media. A blog can establish you as an expert, open you up to organic search traffic, help you grow an audience, and be a part of a coherent marketing plan for your business, but getting started can be tricky. What do you write about? How frequently should you write? What if nothing happens?

The truth is that starting a blog for your small business is like anything else.  It takes time, effort, practice and a bit of patience. It also can be very achievable for any business looking to create a web presence if done correctly.  Here are three tips to help you get started:

1. Make it genuinely useful

Ironically the best way to make your blog a marketing weapon is to first forget about everything else and make the blog genuinely awesome in its own right. If you can build a blog with posts that are just plain interesting, relevant, educational, insightful, inspiring, or useful, then you are off to a great start. It’s only after you have established the blog as a valuable tool that you can truly consider its marketing impact.

To create a useful blog, you have to put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Since this is a small business blog, the reader could potentially be interested in your business. Ask yourself what those readers would find useful and valuable? Let’s look at some examples.

Consider a small niche electrical store selling energy efficient products. For a business like that, I would expect a blog that offers tips on saving money off energy bills, choosing a great energy provider and how-to articles about repairing broken electrical products.

What type of blog does a hairdressing salon building up a local presence create? This blog might have posts about hair care, tips for creating different hair-do’s out of a single haircut and fashionable celebrity hairstyles.

You’re probably seeing a trend here, but let’s look at one more example. What about a copywriter looking to do corporate work? A blog for a copywriter might have posts about top faux-pas that you can accidentally create, how to map out all the copy needs a small business might have and how copy can affect a business promotion’s success.

The underlying principle is to think about valuable information that you can offer readers related to your business. Creating content like this is also one of the best ways to get ranked for search results, especially when combined with good on page SEO.

2. Target Social Media

As a new small business blog with good content, your biggest challenge is building an audience. Having a steady baseline audience is important because it allows you to gain momentum around social sharing, comments and interaction, and links. These things all feed off each other and you can gradually build from there.

But how do you get the initial audience? There are lots of different ways depending on the business, but for a purely online solution assuming no prior audience base, you can’t beat social media. The beauty of social media is it allows you to tap into existing audience groups, but it’s not necessarily easy, and there are a few things you will need.

After establishing great content, the next thing you need to do is target the right social media sites and this depends entirely on the business/content niche you are in. Let’s look back at our previous examples.

For our energy saving blog, I would look at Reddit as a good place to target. There are channels on Reddit with strong environmentally conscious audiences, perfect for tips on energy. There are also DIY type channels which might be good for how-to topics, especially if they are a bit geeky/tech.

For our hair dressing blog, I would suggest Pinterest, and would aim to get some very image heavy posts prepared. Pinterest has the right audience mix for fashion and hair, and it’s a great place to share imagery, tips, and links.

For the copywriter blog I’d look at LinkedIn. Social sharing on LinkedIn has been growing and there are more and more features to help you build followers. For a blog aimed at business needs, LinkedIn is the perfect place to create an audience.

Of course sharing content on social media is almost an endeavor in itself. The keys are to identify the right social media site, spend time actively using the site apart from trying to spread your own blog content, build up personal networks, and then slowly and occasionally introduce your own content.

3. Keep At It

The best advice I ever got in blogging was to think of it as a marathon, not a sprint. Like most everything in life, you will get better and more effective with time and effort. When I first started out blogging, I began where everyone does – with no audience, no network, no experience, and writing skills that were in need of practice.

I spent hours every day on my blog for months, and during that time I would network with other bloggers, read about blogging, engage with social media sites in every niche I could find, experiment with different post types and techniques, and do everything I could think of to find readers.

In time I went from dozens of page views a day to hundreds, and eventually much, much bigger. Today my business runs a blog with millions of readers, but I still think the biggest accomplishment I ever had in blogging was getting from zero readers to the first hundred regular visitors.

If you put in the time, effort, energy and determination, your blog will eventually blossom and you will reap the rewards!

As cofounder and CEO, Collis Ta’eed leads Envato, one of the world’s most thriving digital marketplaces and creative educational blog networks. Envato is recognized for the educational Tuts+ and Tuts+ Premium networks as well the ThemeForest Marketplace, but oversees more than 30 sub-brands, where close to 2 million people buy and sell digital assets from site themes to stock media, or hone their creative skills.

Filed Under: Blogging, Content marketing, Social Media Tagged With:
Nov 27 2012
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How to Get More From Every Piece of Content You Produce

This post is sponsored by Viewbix – Easily add apps and calls to action to your video.

Content creation must involve strategy. That’s the part that you must understand or its production is little more than a chore.

Repurpose content

photo credit: markyweiss

For some time now I’ve been preaching the idea of a “total body of work” approach to content for marketing purposes.

Waking up each day and deciding what you might blog about is not a sustainable content strategy – even though many a blogger makes it look so.

The publishing that we must do today requires us to think like, well, a publisher. We must develop a clear set of topics or chapters that make up the foundation content for trust building and SEO impact. We must determine a monthly theme and schedule for addressing each chapter. We must commit to regularly scheduled features.

And, perhaps most importantly, we must develop a mentality that habitually urges us to consider every word we publish or plan to publish as part of a giant Erector set or content that can be used and reused in many ways.

Every press release, blog post, video, article and presentation must have intended uses beyond its obvious initial outlay and it must be an interchangeable element in the total body of work.

It’s simply too costly to produce content with any other view.

I once had a conversation with Josh Waitzkin, eight-time National Chess Champion and author of the Art of Learning and he told me that he got to the point where he no longer saw a game as it was because to him the game always looked as though it was going to be many moves ahead.

I think that’s how content must be viewed – not as something just for today, but for moves ahead.

The process starts with questioning that must evolve into an unconscious way of thinking.

  • How could I expand this blog post as a series of posts?
  • How could I rework this content into other formats?
  • What would make this content worth paying for?
  • How could this content be reworked for real-time consumption?
  • What did I learn while creating this presentation?
  • How could I package this content to share it with a different market?
  • If I were writing a book would this content belong in that book?
  • What content have I already written that could form the basis of an eBook?
  • How can I share this content in a way that helps me learn?

Below are five content development habits that you must employ in the creation of your content strategy and production of your body of work.

New medium

I’m often asked to present a specific topic to a group. As I create or develop my thoughts for a series of slides I write a blog post or two from my research, record a screencast of the presentation, upload my slides to Slideshare and have the video transcribed into text.

There is very little additional work on my part to create four and five pieces of content from the act of discovering what to include in a 90-minute talk.

New form

I’ve produced dozens of eBooks over the last few years and 100% of the content for these compilations has been drawn from my blog posts. Now, understand that this doesn’t happen by some form of chance.

I plan and write my blog posts with these eBooks in mind. This requires a longer view of both blog post topics and the chosen topics for eBooks, but when you understand that this long view is required, it’s actually quite freeing.

Getting in the habit of creating an editorial calendar in advance, with your cornerstone topics always in mind, can be a great aid.

New purpose

One of the most puzzling aspects of content is consumption – meaning how people choose to get, read, listen, watch or otherwise digest it.

Understanding that people have distinct preferences in this category opens the door to an interesting aspect of repurposing.

I have a podcast that’s free to subscribe to, but hundreds of people have paid $2.99 to download the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast app (iTunes link) from iTunes because of the added control it gives them.

I have a great deal of content that is available on my site for the taking, yet people are eager to pay $3.99 on Amazon for the package that gives them the content in the form that is delivered to their Kindle reader.

New time frame

This one is a bit mind bending for some, but you have to think about real-time and long-term in the same context.

I tweet as I write something that I think is poignant and again as I write things that seem confusing. People consume this content in a far different manner than, say, a full blog post, but the engagement is incredibly instructional.

Social media is the ultimate real-time content package and this is how you tap it.

New audience

My blog readers and my newsletter subscribers are two very different groups. Sure, there’s some cross over, but some people prefer email newsletters and some won’t read anything that’s not in their RSS reader.

When you understand this fact you can begin to explore the various methods of reaching people in their preferred environment.

Giving away content in the form of a free Amazon eBook is a great way to reach new audiences. Creating workshops and making them available as a Udemy course is a great way to reach new audiences. Reworking your ten all time best blog posts and offering them as guest posts on other blogs is a great way to reach new audiences.

Once you start to think in this vein you’ll never look at a blog post or PowerPoint deck in the same way.

viewbixThis post is sponsored by Viewbix – Easily add apps and calls to action to your video.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,